Design and Implementation of a RF Signal Record & Playback System Based on PCI Express Bus

This paper presents the design scheme and implementation of a RF Signal Record & Playback System, which is able to record and store RF data directly from an active antenna or generate RF signals from data stored on a solid state drive. It introduces the organization and building components of the system, with a key emphasis on the design of system hardware, PCI Express bus interface and the DMA mode. By using the DMA mode, the continuous transfer rate of the bus is up to 1200Mbit/s. The experiment indicates that the system eliminates the bottleneck of real-time data acquisition and can be applicable to various kinds of RF signal especially the GPS navigation signal.